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Topic: Alternative Tunings
The next in my series of alternate tuning articles is the E Minor or 'Skip James' tuning.
For this tuning, the fourth and fifth strings are tuned up one whole step. This tuning works quite well for minor blues playing since the seventh chords are easily accessible from the barre position. This is a barre heavy tuning since open it plays a minor chord. By fingering the third string below the barre, you get the major chord and on the third fret below the barre on the second string you can pick up the seventh. You can drop this tuning a whole step to DADFAD to get a lower tone from the D minor chord.
The scale tones created by this tuning are
| String | Scale Tone |
| 1st | root |
| 2nd | fifth |
| 3rd | minor third |
| 4th | root |
| 5th | fifth |
| 6th | root |
My demo starts with the open string strum. Then I try to do a Skip James-ish riff. Keeping the barre clean and fingerpicking at the same time was a bit of a challenge to me. I'm going to have to practice this more. Finally, I end with some slide riffs. I think this tuning would make an interesting slide tuning if you played around with it a bit.
Click Here To Download Em Tuning Demo MP3
If you want to hear the master, Skip James, at work with this tuning, rather than my lame attempts at it, watch these two videos on YouTube:
Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions about the Em Tuning and I'll try to answer them as best I can.
EDIT: Wikipedia has a good article on Skip James that sheds some extra light on his playing and life.
One thing to note about these alternative tunings is often you'll see the same tuning dropped a half or whole step. For example, most of Skip James' recorded tunes were performed in D Minor, not E Minor, tuning. In this series I'm going to cover the variation closest to standard tuning in most cases to make things easier.
